Movie

Even beginning with 2007, with the re-taking of Croatia's negotiations for integration in the EU, KulturForum Europa (KFE) came with the clear and positive initiative for Croatia to be recognised as being part of the European reunion and of being officially integrated in the EU house. The fact that even after two years nothing happened in this sense displeased Croatia and a deviation towards the extreme political camp is floating in the horizon like a ghost.

It surely was expected from the omnibus movie Tales from the Golden Age to allow a better perception of the Romanian New Wave; during pre-production, there were rumors even about prestigious names being selected for directing, names that compete unofficially for being the most representative for the New Wave in general. It almost doesn't matter that those rumors were not true and that the actual crew consists of Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höfer, Răzvan Mărculescu, Constantin Popescu and Cristian Mungiu.

It's difficult to tell what the romance movie of our century will look like, since the century that created the cinema patented the melodrama, only to see it disappear in pastiche and irony at the end of those hundred years. What's certain is that class clashes and class romances and sacrifice in the name of love don't work anymore on screen, as it is easy to see following the fate of the ridiculed Titanic by James Cameron.

It seems that a national complicity surrounded the debut of Matheus Nachtergaele as a director. At last year's Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, Dead Girl's Feast was awarded not only with the prize for best director, but also the prize for best actor, for Daniel de Oliveira. At Chicago, Nachtergaele won the prize for Best New Director.

What is obvious about Robert Lakatos' Bahrtalo! is its mixture of documentary and fiction, a hybrid genre that the director has labelled "situational documentary"; regarding the subject, Bahrtalo! is a movie about friendship; but even more important than the moving friendship between a Hungarian and a Gabor Gypsy, Lori and Lali, is the bond between the two characters and the director Robi, as they call him in the interviews they give.

It frequently happens, when an actor makes his first movie as a director, that he/ she will be preoccupied mainly to ensure to his own cast a sense of freedom, to allow them to improvise and build carefully their characters. Seeing the film as a theatrical show, the actor-gone-director will live a strange kind of symbiosis with his crew, and it usually happens that the overall praises will go to certain members of the crew, as the cinematographer or the art director.

You just can't ask an enfant terrible of the cinema like Lars von Trier to have manners. Since losing Palme d'Or in 1991 for the Coen brothers (Europa versus Barton Fink), when rumor has it that von Trier gave the finger to Roman Polanski, president of the jury that year, the Danish director seemed a perpetual subject for the press, with his impious, half digested remarks (or, who knows?).

I don't know how it happens, but every year, together with the first cherries a problem appears as well, a problem that complicates lives, provokes family discussions, stirs up sighs, takes the monster out of the gentle man: TIFF or The Theatre Festival in Sibiu? Obviously, it is a tradition, the two events take place at the same time every year, I never succeed in rolling out the moment of decision, but I heard that it happens to others as well.